SEO moves fast. It’s an ever-changing discipline where what worked six months ago, might be completely out of date. However, there are some fundamentals that stay more or less the same. The meta description is not a ranking factor, but it does play an important part in optimizing your Click Through Rate (CTR). Writing blog content is one of the best ways to generate traffic and inbound links to your site. Marketers who blog consistently see up to 97% more organic links generated for their site. Guest blogging greatly contributes to that number if you’ve made that part of your content marketing strategy. A popular practice,
and thought to be best
for SEO, is to include
your target keyword as
close to the start of the
page title as reasonably
possible (so that it still
makes sense).

Don’t Quit Your Day Job

Page copy should be informative and of interest to you readers. Don’t write it just for the robots, write for the humans that will be visiting. Yes you need to include keywords here but only if they make sense. Once again, do not keyword stuff your copy, you’ll only get yourself penalised. While the page meta data (page description and keywords) are not nearly as important as they used to be, they still count. Take advantage of them by putting your keyword or phrase there. Over the years I've seen webmasters and SEOs being concerned over boilerplate content, such as repetitive legal disclaimers or navigation on the header or footer of your pages. But Google time and time again has said they can handle it and they don't penalize for this type of content. A fully mobile-optimized website will be easy to read and play smoothly on even the smallest mobile device screens. Images should be able to be easily enlarged and the navigation should be smooth and easy to follow.

85% of people searching on Google are clicking on the organic search results

What if I was to tell you Google has a powerful collection of tools that tell you exactly how often they crawl your site, what they think it’s about, and even suggestions on things they have trouble with? And that you can have it? For free? You’d want it, wouldn’t you? Outbound, or external, links are links pointing outwards from your site to another website. They pass along some of your own site’s ranking power. Focus on keywords that have higher search volume but don’t neglect long tail keywords. If optimized right, you can get more traffic from keywords with less search volume. Google Analytics is an intuitive and free measurement platform that gives you insight into all of your webpages. It all starts with a line of code that you put in the header of your website that will let you install a container of Google tags, that will give you visibility in your analytics Dashboard.

Add a Pin It plugin to your site

Google wants to see that you have a legitimate site with legitimate traffic. This means your content needs to be stellar. Using structured data, you can serve Google your address details in the most convenient way. Once you are done with cleaning up all the toxic backlinks pointing to your site, you need to file a reconsideration request with Google. This has to be polite and detailed, stating that you admit the mistakes you have committed, explaining the steps that you took to correct the same and promising to use nothing, but best practices for link building and SEO. Gaz Hall, from SEO Hull, had the following to say: "Instead of writing on-page copy for the sole purpose of repeating a
keyword multiple times, you should write about your product or service
or idea naturally, and let your keyword variations naturally fall into place.
If that doesn’t happen, go back and spring in some variations into the
content so that the same message gets across, just optimized!"

Don’t just optimize content for a single target phrase

Boilerplate content is a fact on the web with many many sites, espesially sites that do rank well and are very credible. Google handles it, you don't really need to worry about the boilerplate content, Google can figure that part out. It is not known how many users out there use the Google Toolbar, but the authors believe that they number in the millions. Google can track the entire web surfing behavior of these users. Term weighting refers to the importance of a particular search term to the query. The idea is to weight particular terms more heavily than others to produce superior search results. In the past, creating keyword rich anchor text used to be considered an effective strategy as long as they were on relevant sites. However, those days are long gone! Now, any keyword rich anchor text that you create on your own goes against Google’s guidelines.